


Earth-5

by nirejseki



Series: Earth-5 [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Earth-5, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-04 02:10:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6636856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pretzel-log1c on tumblr came up with this AU: "Earth 5 - Barry Allen is a detective that is part of the metahuman task force. Thanks to Leonard Snart, aka The Flash, he’s gotten the moniker of Captain Cold thanks to the Cold gun Cisco built for Barry. The nickname frustrates and embarrasses Barry because he’s not even a captain. Ironically, Cisco and Snart agree alliteration is catchy and captain just sounds cool."</p>
<p>And then fic happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Earth-5

Barry was still in his pajamas. For some reason, that was the thing he couldn’t get over. Not the fact that his apartment had been totally trashed. Or that his stuff was all probably history. Or even that the perp who’d basically laid waste to an apartment building was actually a GIANT SHARK. Nope. All that was just your average Tuesday for the leader of the Regulation of Generated Ultra-human Entities Squad. (Barry was going to hunt down the smartass in the papers that decided to call them the ROGUES. They were a _police unit_. That made them sound like criminals.) But pajamas?

“I didn’t even get to _change_ ,” Barry says plaintively, this time speaking out loud. No one should be forced to do work before their first cup of coffee, much less before they’d gotten out of their pajamas.

“I don’t know, I think you look rather dashing,” a voice drawled from behind him. “Particularly the little penguins.”

Oh, yeah, and then there was _that_. Captain Cold (still need to kill Cisco for that) gets rescued by the Flash _from his own apartment_. He was never going to live this down.

“How do you even know where I live?” Barry asked, deciding to just own the penguins. Sure, they were originally a gag gift from Iris right after the first whole ‘wait you told the newsboys your stupid ‘Captain Cold’ codename thing?!’ Cisco Ramon fiasco, but they were also easily the snuggliest things he’d ever touched in his life. If a man couldn’t have little penguins on his night shirt, especially if he wasn’t entertaining company that night, what was the point of life?

“I make a point to learn a bit about my new arch-nemesis,” Snart said, still there. Barry turned to look at him.

Snart looked more tired than usual, with circles under his eyes and his skin a little paler, a starker contrast from his brightly colored suit (which he stole) than usual. But he was smirking just like he always did. 

“ _New_? After everything we’ve meant to each other?” Barry said ironically. “After the attack on the Evanston Theater? That train car diamond heist? The mess you made at Santini’s Casino?”

“Santini’s a mob front and you know it,” Snart returned, smirk widening. “And I got that diamond in the end.”

_Ugh_ , point to Snart.

“But you didn’t get it from the train car,” Barry pointed out, crossing his arms. “So what’s all this about us being new?”

Snart’s smirk shifted to an actual grin and suddenly he was right in front of Barry instead of across the room. “Aw, Allen, how sweet. I didn’t know that you thought of us as an ‘us’.”

Barry leaned back, looking up at Snart and rolling his eyes. “You’re all talk, Snart,” he said, about 95% sure that this was true. Snart was a thief, not a killer, and everyone they’d ever interviewed (known associates, known victims, and the occasional landlord) that had known the man before the particle accelerator explosion had recalled him as being a gentleman. More or less. “New?”

“Well, it’s officially in the papers now, Allen,” Snart said, looking delighted. “You know nothing’s true in this town unless the newspaper boys say it is.”

Barry made a face, acknowledging. “Kings of the ink,” he said, sighing. “And here I keep deluding myself that we live in a democracy…actually, I didn’t get a chance to see the damage yet. Aren’t you already my nemesis?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Snart said agreeably. “But now that ARGUS has started moving in on your turf, plus all these new metas, the boys and girls in charge have decreed that you and me, we’re something special.” He held out his arms. “I’m your red whale.”

Barry poked Snart in the stomach. “More like my red whale _skeleton_. Don’t you eat?” he asked, only half-joking. Iris liked to razz him about making eyes at Snart, and maybe he did look at the way the man filled out that suit a bit more than was strictly necessary, but seriously, you’d have to be blind not to notice the weight Snart had lost recently. 

Snart raised his eyes to the sky as if praying for patience. “Lisa and Mick are one thing, but you too? That’s just going too far. I’ll pick up some take-out on my way home, that make you happy?”

“You going to pay for that take-out?” Barry asked, mentally noting down the new name. Lisa he already knew; Snart’s infamous sister with degrees in metallurgy and engineering, and a knack for trasmutational devices that had Cisco writing her love letters in his technical reports, but he’d never heard of an ultra-human named “Mick”.

Snart’s grin told him everything he needed to know.

_Thieves_.

“Why’re you still here, anyway? You know the bluecoats – you know, the ones that are actually _on duty_ – will be here soon; I’m not the only man on the force who lives in this building.”

Snart shrugged. “Me knowing where you live is one thing, Frosty,” he said. “You and me, we’re playing bluecoats and robbers, and I like that–” 

“It’s _not_ a game!”

“– but I want to know who set the Shark on you. Attacking a man at home just ain’t kosher.”

Barry frowned. That was true – the Shark was a well-known mob enforcer (though no one had ever said that he was an ACTUAL SHARK now, Barry was never going to get over that), but the mob had rules of parlay that usually excluded such attacks, especially on members of law enforcement like himself. Plus, he was on the ultra-human squad which - despite its notoriety in the papers - wasn’t all that important or well-funded; he wasn’t exactly a prime mob target. 

“Surprised you didn’t just check what the mob heads had to say about it,” he said, trying to think it through. “I know you’ve broken their security.”

“It ain’t security if it can’t keep me out,” Snart said, arrogant as always. Barry was going to design a cold field that would fit into a doorway just to stick it to him, just as soon as he and Cisco found a way to duplicate the technical accident that had powered up his Cold Gun.

Speaking of which, had he taken that home with him? Was it buried under the rubble, unreachable for hours, if not days?

Snart looked at Barry’s face and did that _extremely annoying_ trick of somehow managing to divine what was bothering him, disappearing in a flash (goddamnit, now the papers had _him_ saying it!) and reappearing twenty seconds later with the Gun, still in its holster, and offering it out to Barry. “Let it on your desk at work,” Snart said. “Don’t do that again. You need to protect yourself.” 

“I’m sure the mob had a good reason for trying to take me out,” Barry said, taking the Gun. “Even if they’re being jerks about it.”

Snart’s frown stopped him. “That’s the thing, kid,” the other man said. “Darbinyans say they’ve got him working a job in Hub, and someone like that don’t exactly travel unnoticed, if you get my drift. He shouldn’t have been here at all.”

Barry scowled. Snart was right; that _was_ weird. He liked Snart – the man may be a thief and a pain in his ass, but he wasn’t a bad guy. If only he could be convinced to give up the habit of taking whatever he wanted, he’d be a hell of an asset for the good guys (Barry had gotten at least one strongly worded letter from an Eo. Thawne up at City Hall telling him to that his crusade to get Snart in line had better start showing results soon). Sure, Snart had been committing crimes all over the city, usually among the so-called “influential citizenry”, but he’d also tipped Barry off on a couple of nasty smuggling rings and assassination attempts. 

And he _had_ just saved Barry’s life.

“I’ll keep a look out,” he promised. “Now get out of here, I hear sirens and I don’t want to spend the rest of the day talking to Internal Affairs about my use of CIs again.”

Snart grinned. “Thanks, Allen. Keep it cool.”

Barry tilted his head back and groaned. By the time he looked up, Snart was gone.

In a Flash.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: The aesthetic of Earth-5 is significantly more steampunk than Earth-1 or Earth-2’s futuristic vibe. There’s more reliance on trains and steamships, the class divide between the euphemistically titled “influential class” and the rest of society is fairly stark, and the fashion is more Victorian - both in the sense of the style and in the sense of their love for _eye-searing_ color saturation. I have sketches of Len and Barry’s outfits which are posted here: http://robininthelabyrinth.tumblr.com/post/143213688329/crappy-cell-phone-photos-of-my-terrible-sketches 
> 
> The newspapers on Earth-5 have the sort of dominance they had in Gilded Age America - they set the terms of the conversation politically, economically, and socially. You cross the editors of the Central Big Five (the three national papers and the two big “local” papers) at your peril; they can have you celebrated one day and bring you down with muckraking investigations and criticism the next. The reporters are fondly referred to as the “newsboys”, which is a nickname granted regardless of gender or age.
> 
> Barry is part of the _Generated_ Ultra-Human task force, specifically relating to ultra-humans created by the particle accelerator explosion as opposed to naturally generated ones or extraterrestrial ones, which are subject to different the jurisdiction of groups, none of which are headquartered in Central.
> 
> Cisco has not yet met Lisa. He really, really wants to. Unfortunately for him, he’s probably going to meet Mick first.


End file.
